Wednesday, September 10, 2008

We're not out of the woods yet


OK, so turning on the Large Hadron Collider early this morning didn't create a black hole that sucked in everything in it's path.

Yet, that is.

It is my understanding that right now the LHC is only firing particles in one direction, and things won't actually start colliding for a month or so. Once that starts, the feared-but-unlikely black hole could manifest at any time. So if you're sitting on the couch minding your own business sometime in October and suddenly your perception of time slows down and everything looks all rubbery and stretched out, prepare to be winked out of existence.

And what would that be like? Well, charmingly enough, something like this:

"Your body would be shredded apart into the smallest possible pieces. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote the definitive account Death by Black Hole, imagined the experience as "the most spectacular way to die in space."

Thanks, Neil. I'm going to head home and tightly clutch my teddy bear now.

2 comments:

RGame said...

There's probably already a pair of secret government agents -- one man, one woman, secretly attracted to each other but unwilling to show it -- working on the problem. They'll solve it through a series of interrogations, fist fights and chases through unlit corridors, followed by a jump from a fire escape, a near kiss, and a tense scene where they pull their guns but don't fire. The world will be saved and we'll never know anything about it, because we're just sheep, mindless idiots who post comments on blogs.

Blogfoot said...

You forgot the part where they calmly walk towards the camera while something blows up behind them.